


Du Liebes Kind, Komm, Geh Mit Mir

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 23:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11092464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Some time after she moves to America, Maria Jackson gets wrapped up in mysterious temporal events and Sarah Jane's past.





	1. Chapter 1

The first time it happened, I was on the school bus.

American school buses aren't as cute and—I don't know, cartoony—as they seem on the telly. They really do look just like you think, bright yellow and unmistakable, and all the other drivers are supposed to be extra careful around them. They even have little stop signs on their sides to stop oncoming traffic. But on the inside, they're all hard brown seats and unbelievable racket. Every five minutes our bus driver would yell for the boys in the back to shut up, and every five minutes, like clockwork, they ignored her.

It was the worst environment in the world to help my new friend Yoko with her maths, but I was trying anyway. "It's just that Mr. Jankowski is useless at explaining," I said, as loudly and clearly as I could without shouting. "My dad showed me how to work this one. It's like a computer program; you just sort of plug numbers in, and the one on top tells you where to _stop—"_

And then everything did. Stop, I mean.

I pitched forward and hit the seat in front of us. For a second, I thought the bus had hit something.

For another second, I thought I'd concussed myself and gone deaf somehow. I couldn't hear anything. It was beyond quiet. The only thing I could hear—the only sound in the entire world—was me, breathing.

I sat back up.

Yoko was frowning at her textbook, mouth slightly opened as if to say something. Frozen mid-motion, as if someone had pressed pause for the entire world.

I looked around, and it was everyone. The boy across the aisle from me, who was trying to ride the bus with his trombone case—stopped. The ginger boy who was leaning over the back of his seat, about to poke his shoulder—stopped. A pencil that had fallen out of someone's knapsack—stopped _mid-air._

It wasn't just the bus. Outside the window, the cars and pedestrians and birds were frozen too. We were passing the hospital, and I could see a helicopter hanging near the roof, propeller blades motionless. 

It sounds a bit wrong to say that there was a thrill underneath the creepy tingle running down my spine, but there was. Last year—last bizarre, _marvellous_ year—I'd found out that the universe is gigantic and strange and wondrous and alive. There are dangers that would scare you senseless, myths made real, ancient evil creatures making devil's bargains for other peoples' lives—but there are also people who sing in color and beings that speak only through dance and lost tourists who just happen to be able to fly. This had to be part of that. Time doesn't freeze on its own, humans can't do it, so who does that leave? From what I had seen, a whole galaxy's worth of options.

I stood up cautiously. I didn't see anything moving, but I was ready to duck the moment I saw anything the least bit gun-shaped. The first thing to do was figure out whether whoever-it-was was hostile or not. My heart was pounding and part of my brain was screaming, _of course they're hostile, this is spooky!_ Being scary wasn't a guarantee that something was bad, though. Last year, I'd met someone who looked like a giant spider with huge mandibles and a language made of hissing and clicking noises. He'd swapped Sarah Jane about a carload of useful alien tech for an iPod full of Bach concertos. Ethnomusicologist, he'd told me. (Mr. Smith's translation gave him a ridiculously posh accent.) He travelled the universe collecting music from all different cultures and making comparisons among them, to figure out who had been influenced by alien traders and visitors. He said that he thought human larvae were extraordinarily charming and polite and if I couldn't pronounce his full name, I could call him George.

When in doubt, act unafraid. "Hello?" I said.

The air sounded—I don't know. There's a difference between the silence in an empty auditorium and a closet, and this wasn't either of them. It was—deader than that.

I really wished I hadn't thought of it like that.

Whatever was happening, I thought, it didn't have to be centered around the bus. Things could be frozen for miles around. I stepped into the aisle.

And that was when everything started again, with a lurch. I had to grab onto the seats on either side of me to keep from falling. Everybody was shouting again, and it hit me like I'd walked into a wall.

"Maria?" Yoko was looking at me, wide-eyed. "What's the matter? You all right?"

~~~~~~~~

The next time was later that day, at the mall.

I was there with Yoko because she had appointed herself my guide to all things American. She remembered what it was like, she said, even though she'd moved here when she was just six. The truth was, I didn't need a guide; it wasn't like I had to learn a new language, like Yoko had. And the truth, I think, was that Yoko didn't really care. I was reminded of Clyde and Luke. Clyde would get it into his head that Luke needed to know about something, like Indiana Jones movies, and he'd drag Luke over to my house because we had a slightly bigger telly. Later on we'd eat ice cream while Luke explained solemnly that the goddess Kali wasn't supposed to be a negative force, that being scary and not even a little bit tame didn't make her _bad,_ and Clyde would complain that he'd totally missed the point, which was _mine car chase._ And I'd think that they were both missing the point, which was that it didn't honestly matter what movie we'd seen. That was background detail.

It was a little bit like that with Yoko. It didn't really matter what we were talking about. "Totally faked," she was saying.

"They're not, though."

"Yeah, they are, come on."

"I swear they aren't. I tried to text my friend Clyde once and tell him I was out in the garden, and my phone turned it into _out in the garter snake._ I don't even know what a garter snake is." Well, I hadn't before that little mix-up. Clyde had decided that it had to be a euphemism, and all of Luke's _actually, it's a snake of the genus Thamnophis_ couldn't dissuade him.

"We had one in my second grade classroom," Yoko said. "Kind of a small snake with yellow stripes. They kept wanting me to touch it and saying it wasn't slimy, and I kept saying it wasn't about slimy, it was about _snake._ So, okay, I guess maybe _sometimes_ the phone messes up, but that doesn't explain why all the quotes on the website are pretty much about se—"

And everything froze. Again.

It was even eerier in the mall. There were people stopped mid-stride. They should never have been able to balance like that, but there they were, tilted and suspended between one step and the next.

There was a ten-year-old boy standing right next to the sign that said PLEASE DO NOT THROW COINS IN FOUNTAIN. He had been tossing a penny in, naturally, and it was hanging in mid-air. And so were the droplets of water.

The air had a thick, blanketlike feel to it. I felt a little bit light-headed and couldn't tell whether it was because I was frightened or there was some alien effect or whether I was actually having trouble getting enough air to breathe. Just like before, I was the only sound in the entire world.

I turned all the way around. Nothing moving. Not anywhere.

I walked over to the fountain. I was wearing trainers, and I could still hear every step.

I reached over the side and touched the water. I thought it would be like glass. Instead, it felt a little bit like jelly and got my hand wet just like normal. I left a hand-print where I touched it.

_"Weird."_ I hadn't meant to whisper that, and I straightened up quickly and looked around. I had this—I'm not sure how to describe it, but this _trespassing_ feeling. Like I should hide.

For an instant, I thought I saw something grey move, out of the corner of my eye. And my heart jumped so hard that it _hurt._ I spun around.

Nothing. No movement. A frozen world.

I was holding onto my purse, tightly. After the incident on the bus, I'd taken some things out of my knapsack and resolved to keep them with me. The most important, as far as I was concerned, was the Verron puzzle box. Neither Sarah Jane nor I knew exactly what it was or how it worked, but it had saved her life from being erased, once. It had something to do with time, and it was powerful, in a subtle sort of way. Having it on me, even if I wasn't exactly _touching_ it, might be the reason I wasn't frozen too. I didn't know if the effect on the bus had ended because it ended, or because I had taken my foot off my knapsack.

But there were a couple of other things Sarah Jane had given me the last time I visited England (which was for my mother's wedding). One of them was a little crystal, shaped like a teardrop, that was supposed to detect unusual energies of all kinds. It was supposed to turn a different color for different sorts, but Sarah Jane had said that part didn't seem to work too well; it was just a general first-warning system.

I opened my purse and saw a flickering, pale glow. The crystal was reacting to it, whatever it was.

God, I wished Sarah Jane were here. And Luke, and Clyde. Sarah Jane would have a complete list of aliens who could manipulate time in any way, including one old friend of hers. Luke would be talking about physics and how this could happen. Clyde would have analyzed the mall for zombie attack defensibility the moment he walked in the doors, so he would know exactly where to run. And me—well, I'm smart, I'm observant, and I don't panic all that easily but I definitely felt like it right _now,_ because I was all alone amid freaky, _freaky_ frozen people and the thing about being all alone is that no matter how much you turn around, there's always a behind you for the monster to be—

And someone pushed play. And the world started up.

Yoko let out a short, sharp shriek, which had everyone turning to look at her. She looked around frantically, found me, and hurried over. "You—what did you—I swear, you were right _there,_ I was talking to you—" She trailed off, looking at my face. "Maria? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I felt like I was one," I said.

About three minutes later, a man came on the loudspeaker to tell Lily Townsend to report to the information desk, her mom and dad were waiting for her.

Five minutes later, they repeated the announcement for someone named Shaunika Bennett.

~~~~~~~~

By the time my dad and Yoko's mum arrived, it was a full-blown emergency. Nine children had vanished. None of them were babies, but all of them were under twelve. They'd stopped announcing the names after the third one, so apart from the number and the age range, I hadn't been able to find out much.

Yoko seemed startled that I was writing everything down. Of course, she thought it must be some sort of human child snatcher, and not something either of us could help with. I'd like to think I would have known better even if I hadn't been left unfrozen. Nine kids vanishing at the same time—and, from what I heard one father bellowing at a security guard, some people had actually _seen_ them disappear, into thin air—that's not something that one psychopath can do.

The police were checking people entering and leaving the mall. Yoko's mum got through first, but they stayed with me until my dad came through the makeshift checkpoint, looking stiff and controlled and a little white around the lips. Yoko usually rolls her eyes at her mum's hovering, but today she didn't mind at all.

Dad waited until the two of them were gone, holding each other's hands. Then he said, "Is it—"

_"Definitely_. I'll tell you when we're outside."

It actually took until we got to the metro station for me to fill him in properly. I didn't want to be talking about child-snatching aliens in front of the police. They wouldn't believe me, they'd wonder if I were part of it, and it still made me a little bit nervous that they all had guns. "We've got to call Sarah Jane," I concluded, as we went down the escalator. "This is big. She might not be able to come herself, but she's got friends all over. There's this one bloke, I think he's a retired general or something, who consults on alien problems all around the world—"

And it happened again.

I almost panicked right then. Dad was holding my hand, and I could just imagine myself being stuck there, unable to pull free, as the child-snatching somethings came for me. Luckily, although it was very hard to move his fingers, his hand didn't go entirely rigid, not like stone. It took me a moment of pulling, but I got myself loose.

No use in hoping that these were _nice_ time-stopping aliens, not after the missing children. I wove between the static people on the still escalator. Maybe I could see them taking children this time if I got onto the platform.

My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry.

There was a metro train stopped—no. There was a metro train pulling into the station; it just looked stopped because everything else was. I wondered if they could freeze the entire city, or the entire planet. Surely people would notice if they just put the pause on a small area.

Metro stations in Washington DC are fairly nice, not like the New York subway stations in the movies. They're big and arching and lit well enough that you can see. But they're still underground, and the light still isn't daylight, and right now, that was making me very nervous.

And there's something creepy about walking past stopped people. If you've ever been scared of department store mannequins—well, it was a bit like that, only moreso. People look _wrong_ when their eyes aren't moving, when they stare straight through you as if you don't even exist, when they aren't breathing.

I kept feeling like something was moving behind my back, when I looked away. It was silent, it was very silent—could I really hear a sort of swishing noise, like a soft brush dragging across concrete? Or was that my ears playing tricks on me?

I held onto my purse so tightly that my hand hurt.

And then I swore I saw something move, over by the train, a flicker of something coming out from under the wheels. But just as I turned to look at it, someone _grabbed me from behind,_ put his hand over my mouth, and hissed, _"Stay absolutely. Still."_


	2. Chapter 2

I had no intention of keeping still. I would have bit him, and thrashed and kicked and hit him with my elbows, except that I caught a glimpse of the thing that was coming up from under the train.

If whoever-it-was hadn't been holding onto me, I would have bolted for the exits screaming. As it was, I think I stopped breathing. I was paralyzed. Staring like a scared rabbit.

It was grey, and smooth, and hairless, and from the side it looked a bit like a dog-sized ferret. The feet were a bit different, wrongly shaped, a different number of claws on each foot, but the general outline was about right. Only—the body. There was a hole in the front where the head should have been. A big, wide, gaping hole, like its whole body was hollow. Except that wasn't right either, because it wasn't a hole, it was a mouth, a circular mouth like a lamprey has, with a red glow coming from inside like there was fire inside it, and the glimpses I could get between the teeth made it look like the throat went back much, much further than the animal was long, and God, it was _horrible,_ nothing in the universe should look like that, it was just _wrong._

And there was another one oozing out of the corner between the track and the platform across the way.

I felt the man who was holding onto me move, very cautiously and slowly—slower than a heron hunting a fish.

God, there were _more_ of them. They seemed to coalesce under the train, or right where the wall met the floor. First there would be nothing, and then the shadows would draw together until they were like a mucky film on the air, and then there would be a—a thing. 

They didn't seem to have eyes, or ears, or noses, but if I had to guess, I would have said they were sniffing. They must have eaten the kids. Just the thought of those things touching me made me want to throw up. Being eaten by one—

There was a whole pack of them. And they were definitely stalking something. I struggled to breathe quietly.

The man who was holding onto me—and I was pressed up against him, so I was pretty sure—he wasn't breathing at all. Just moving his hand, millimeter by millimeter.

I was terrified enough to cry. In another second or so, I might have started.

And then the man behind me made a short, quick motion, and something flew into the middle of the tracks. Something small and round and bright. He'd thrown it.

The creatures were on it in an instant. In an eyeblink. It was like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy, all thrashing and whipping back and forth. The worst bit, somehow, was that there was _still no noise._ You can't have that amount of motion, of savagery, without sound.

They all seemed to know, all at once, when they were done. It was as if someone had thrown a switch, and they were back to slow prowling. There was nothing shiny on the tracks, now. Nothing at all.

Then they all scooted for cover, more like minnows darting away from a shadow than predators, and an instant after _that,_ time started again.

The man took his hand off my mouth and let me go. I breathed in a huge, giant gulp of air, and it sounded like a sob.

"Pity," he said. He had a deep, resonant, somewhat gorgeous voice. "That was my last cat's-eye."

~~~~~~~~

"Are you all right?" the man said.

I was. I was shaking and I couldn't help it, but they hadn't come near me. Thanks to him—although _he'd_ scared me quite badly, grabbing me like that, and I was still a bit spooked by the not breathing. "I-I'll be fine, sir," I said, and turned around.

Some perfectly humanoid people just _look_ like aliens. He was one of them.

Just for a start, it was early September in Washington DC. Way too early to be wearing an overcoat, which he was. And a waistcoat. And a—I don't know how to describe it except to call it a Harry Potter scarf, only the colors were a bit wrong and anyway, it was long enough to truss up half the cast and the camera crew into the bargain. All of him was like that, from his hair to his height: a little over-the-top, a little larger than life, as if he'd escaped from a cartoon universe.

Especially when he grinned at me, which he did right then. I swear to _God_ he had more than the normal human number of teeth. "Oh, don't be modest, I think you'll be quite good. Not every human being has the presence of mind to hold still when they dearly want to run—would you like a jelly baby?"

He sounded English. In fact, he had what I've always thought of as a BBC accent. And there was every chance he'd gotten it off the radio, too, because most Earth people would have said _not everyone_ instead of _not every human being._ "I don't mean to offend," I said, carefully, "but I shouldn't accept food from strange men."

"Strange?" His eyes went perfectly round. _"Me?"_

It wasn't indignation. Just pure, undiluted bogglement that anyone in the universe could possibly describe him as anything but ordinary. And while I was fumbling for a response to that—any response—he took my purse away and opened it. "Hey, wait—"

All in all, it wasn't the best moment for my Dad to find us. _"Give that back and get away from her!"_

I turned around quickly. Dad is a quiet, conscientious computer programmer who doesn't like confrontation and struggled desperately to be fair-minded even when he figured out that Mum had been seeing other men. And he would attack an alien battle fleet with a butter knife if he thought they were threatening me. "No, Dad, it's okay, he—"

"Would _you_ like a jelly baby?"

Whatever Mister Teeth was, he had the same effect on a conversation as a sudden metal pole between the spokes of a moving motorcycle. Dad looked like his brain had slipped a gear. "What?"

"A jelly baby. A sweet. They're quite good. I think I also might have some—"

A voice—a familiar voice, although more loud and strident than I was used to—said, _"What happened?_ You just _vanished,_ how did you— _what is going on?"_

I stared, mouth open. Dad turned towards her, blinked several times, and then managed, "Sarah Jane?"

~~~~~~~~

She stared at him. It was Sarah Jane, but not the same. Not my Sarah Jane. "Do I know you?"

My Sarah Jane is about fifty—I think. I could be off by a decade or more; she sometimes seems like she's lived whole lifetimes, but she's just as fit as my Dad, who's younger. She wears makeup, but everything else about her appearance is relentlessly sensible, even a touch austere. _This_ Sarah Jane was twenty-something, and her boots had a bit of a heel on them. You could run in the clothes she was wearing, but they were—I don't know, less serious.

"Not yet," I said numbly. "That has to be it."

Sarah Jane looked at me. "What?" she said, more or less in unison with my father.

"Sarah Jane told me. She said that when she was young, she'd traveled in time and space with—should I even be saying this? I mean, she—you—didn't seem to know me when she first met me, but if you met me _now_ —which was back then for her—"

Sarah Jane turned to Mister Teeth, who was watching the whole scene with intense interest and more than a little delight. "They know my older self," she stated incredulously.

I realized that I knew who Mister Teeth was. Who he had to be. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' said Alice," he murmured.

"Doctor," Sarah Jane said, "What. Is going on?"


	3. Chapter 3

When Sarah Jane Smith was a young woman, she travelled through time and space with a man called the Doctor.

She'd saved whole worlds with him. She went into great detail about the planets she'd seen, the aliens she'd met, purple grass and multiple moons and homicidal robots. She'd told me a little bit about the Doctor, too. He was an alien; he'd always been very up-front about that. He came from one of the most ancient and powerful civilizations in the universe, a race that considered themselves the guardians of time and space. He was brilliant and resourceful and often wise, with a powerful moral sense and the courage to go up against any tyrant there ever was. Sometimes Sarah Jane talked about him with a sort of affectionate exasperation, but underneath that, it was quite clear that she respected him more than anyone else in the universe. And anyone who could earn the respect of someone as quietly formidable as Sarah Jane had to be extraordinary.

I'd always pictured him white-haired and dignified. _Looks like a lunatic_ was never part of Sarah Jane's stories.

Once the train pulled away, there weren't as many people around. We moved to a far corner of the platform so that nobody could overhear us without being tremendously obvious about it, and I explained about time stopping again. "And then the—things—just disappeared again. I still don't even know what they _were—"_

"Rats in the walls of the world," the Doctor said. I shuddered a little. I hate the _idea_ of rats. "Scavengers which live on any temporal anomalies that drift down to their layer of the universe, like deep-sea fish living on the detritus of the ocean currents. Luckily for everyone and everything, they can't exist in normal time. They would pop like soap bubbles."

He had given me my purse back. All he had wanted was the Verron puzzle box, which he was examining. It changed shape under his fingers like some sort of tremendously complicated alien Rubik's cube, one minute a diamond, then a dodecahedron, then a three-dimensional snowflake. It was more than I had ever gotten it to do, and some of the changes made no visual sense at all, as if bits were appearing or disappearing. "Is that the reason I wasn't frozen with everyone else?" I asked.

"Frozen?" He sounded indignant, as if someone was talking about his favorite hobby and getting all the names wrong. Sort of like the way Clyde would react if you said that George Romero directed vampire movies. "Nothing was _frozen._ Someone created a bubble of secondary time, at right angles to its primary flow. You were existing in _bet_ time rather than _aleph,_ as one Professor Blinovitch would have it." He changed the puzzle box into something that looked somewhat like a rolled-up hedgehog and tossed it into the air. "If you picture time as a piece of cloth," he held up a bit of his scarf to demonstrate, "and make a fold in it—"

"Has that always been able to do that?" my Dad interrupted, sounding a bit strangled.

He meant puzzle box, which was drifting lazily in mid-air where the Doctor had thrown it. "Not for _me,"_ I said.

The Doctor contrived to do a double-take, as if he'd just noticed it doing that. I was _almost_ certain he was faking it for fun. The fact that I wasn't absolutely sure—well—I'd always pictured him as more _reassuring_ than this, too. "Ahh." The mad smile again. "Now we're getting somewhere."

"Not that any of the rest of us know where," Sarah Jane pointed out a trifle sharply.

The Doctor looked at her as if she'd missed the blatantly obvious. "This is a temporal anchor. Verron-made, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not. Its primary function is to prevent the holder from being affected by alterations in the time-stream. If we went back and stole Maria's tenth birthday cake, so long as she had this, she would still have eaten it."

I nodded. Dad said, "When I had it, I could remember Maria even though the—"

"Dad!" I decided that was way too loud, and lowered my voice. "I'm _really_ sure we can't talk about adventures that are in Sarah Jane's _future."_

Sarah Jane hesitated, then said, "Don't worry about it."

Actually, forget about time bubbles. The most disorienting part of this whole experience was the feeling that I couldn't count on Sarah Jane for impeccable judgment. She was so much different—louder, but less self-assured, less decisive. _Nervous,_ even, and wasn't that a terrifying notion? I'd always thought she was the next thing to fearless. "I don't think—"

Sarah Jane overrode me. _"After—"_ She dropped her voice once I stopped talking. "After this is over, I'm going to forget it ever happened."

"Not forget," the Doctor objected. He was tying a string around the floating puzzle—thingy. Temporal anchor. "Pack away in the attic for a while." More softly, "Thank you, Sarah."

She gave him an uncomfortable nod. "So, you see, you can tell us anything we need to know. Which is probably quite a lot."

I—had no idea what had just happened there. One of those coded exchanges that married people do, almost. But how she could just _forget—_

My Dad said, "So these—time rats—that Maria saw. Did they eat the missing children?"

"What? No, I wouldn't think so. The scavengers are incidental. Opportunists. They saw the anomaly forming and came sneaking around the edges, sniffing about for backwards picoseconds and bits of Monday morning that nobody remembers. They would have gone for Maria, of course, if they had spotted her. More of a feast than they would have had in a thousand years, if they had thousands of years in the dimensions where they exist. Luckily, I had all my marbles." Teeth.

Sarah Jane tried to keep a straight face and failed. "So, Maria was caught in the bubble because she was carrying the anchor. You were pulled into it because . . ." She trailed off.

"Something along those lines, yes."

This time, I knew what they were on about. "You don't have to talk in code," I said impatiently. "I know he's a Time Lord."

Both of them focused on me at once. "Is that so?" the Doctor murmured.

It occurred to me that there might be more than one reason to be nervous about him. He was an alien, I didn't know anything about his culture except that they were highly advanced and called themselves lords, and it was possible I was being extremely rude without realizing it. And once in a while, when aliens decide you aren't acting like proper people, they get very dangerous indeed. Normally, I'd trust anyone that Sarah Jane trusted, but that was before I realized how _young_ she'd been. "I mean—I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't—if it's supposed to be a secret, or—"

"If it's a secret, she hasn't spilled it," my Dad said hastily. "I'm not sure what it means."

"Oh, dusty old rules made by dusty old men, and ancient oaths concerning conflicts long forgotten." The Doctor had the sort of voice where he could declaim Shakespeare and not have it sound silly. It seemed utterly incongruous coming from a six-and-a-half foot funny farm escapee. "Most of the time." He handed me the end of the string. The temporal anchor drifted on the other end like a spiky, unlikely balloon. "On a few rare occasions, it becomes very relevant indeed. _Hold onto that._ Very important." I nodded nervously, and he was back to casual—or as casual as he got, given the mile-wide dramatic streak—in an eyeblink. "Now, _someone_ is clearly tampering with time and using that power to steal children. We need to—"

The world stopped. And the temporal anchor lunged sideways.

"—follow _that,"_ the Doctor concluded in the sudden silence. "Come on!"

~~~~~~~~

It isn't as much fun to run up the down escalator as you might think.

Admittedly, we were doing it when the escalator wasn't moving because we were stuck sideways in time because of child-snatching bad guys, so I don't suppose I gave it a really fair go. And I'm not sure why the Doctor picked that particular escalator to run up. I'm not sure if he even noticed.

I also have no idea how he didn't trip over that scarf.

I caught up with him at the top of the escalator only because he stopped to let me. "What about—" I was panting. "Sarah Jane—and my dad—"

"Time isn't passing for them. There are very few things that can hurt them, but absolutely no way they can help us." The Doctor threw something back down the escalator. It glittered as it flew, and I realized it was another marble.

And then one of the scavenger-things pounced after it, and I realized they were oozing out from the cracks between the stairs. "Oh, God—"

"They're getting bolder. It is _critically_ important that we track down the source of this before something larger and nastier follows them." My temporal anchor was still pulling sideways—straight sideways, now, as if whatever was attracting it was on ground level. The Doctor pointed in that same direction. "This way!"

It was being drawn towards whatever-it-was. The Doctor must have activated some sort of search function. Right now, I wasn't half as concerned about that. "Nastier? _Larger?"_

"Where there are rats, there are cats. And bats. And," the Doctor said ominously, "hounds."

I didn't have the breath to ask for details. I wasn't sure I wanted them.

It was night, by this time, but there was plenty of light from streetlights and headlights and shop windows. It didn't feel like enough. The anchor tugged harder and harder as we closed in on whoever-they-were. We couldn't go straight there because there were buildings in the way, but the Doctor dashed through traffic with blithe disregard for the fact that time could restart at any—well, time.

At one point, he tossed a small handful of marbles over his shoulder. I didn't look back; my imagination was bad enough. A few seconds later, a scavenger billowed up from a street grating, only half-solidified, and lunged at him. It touched the corner of his scarf, and that corner wasn't there anymore. Not burned, not bitten off, just—not.

I didn't have any marbles to throw at it; the closest thing to hand were my house keys. I didn't care. I just threw them, and the horrible beast jumped to catch them in mid-air. Things with short legs like that _shouldn't jump that high,_ and it did anyway. We sprinted around a corner. "Can—they even—hurt you?"

"Kill me, I should think." He sounded matter-of-fact, not at all frightened by it. "Of course, I'm enough of of a complex space-time event that attempting to digest me would destroy them utterly. There's poetic justice, if you like, but not the sort I'd care to experience from the inside."

He reminded me a bit of Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane when she's older, I mean; I hadn't really seen the younger one in action. It wasn't just that he knew what was happening with time—and I was just starting to realize how much I had relied on Sarah Jane knowing which evil aliens were after Earth this week. It was the way he reacted to danger. Oh, he was more likely to flash a mad grin and make a quip, whereas Sarah Jane in a crisis was usually serious. But they were both—I don't know, almost _businesslike_ about it. Deadly peril happened. You ran towards it.

At the end of the street, I saw something that really didn't belong. It looked—I don't want to say that it looked just like a special effect, but it _did,_ really. It looked like someone had cut a hole in the world, just like it were paper only with white-glowing edges around the cut, and through the hole was—somewhere else. I didn't get a very good look at it, but I thought it was daylight there, and it seemed green and misty.

The Doctor pulled me behind a parked car and pointed across the street.

There was a girl, only a little younger than me, lying flat on her back and levitating like a magic trick. She didn't seem to be awake, but she was drifting briskly towards the hole.

And right behind her floated a boy. They seemed to be coming out of some sort of club, and there were drifts of sparkles accompanying them. It was so different from the nasty wrongness of the scavengers that for a moment, I just stared. It was _spooky,_ sure, but after the scavengers, I had expected whatever-was-happening to be—I don't know, more _violent._

I looked sideways at the Doctor, and he looked the grimmest that I'd seen him. "Nodians," he growled.


	4. Chapter 4

I kept my voice to a whisper and looked behind us to see if any scavengers were creeping up on us. They weren't. Maybe it was the Nodians, but they seemed to be staying away from this street. "What are Nodians? How bad are they?"

"Very." He moved from one parked car to the next, bent over, and beckoned me after him. _I_ didn't think he looked especially stealthy, but there wasn't any outcry from the other side of the street—although I didn't know if Nodians made noise at all. "Powerful psychic parasites, among the most despised races in the galaxy. And that despite the fact that vanishingly few people realize they even exist."

"I don't understand."

"Most cultures know them through stories. Fairies and goblins and wicked witches. Look far enough back in your legends, in _anyone's_ legends, and you'll find something that steals children away. Sometimes they're said to lure them in, to promise them a world where every meal is dessert and every day is Christmas. Sometimes they snatch them right out of the cradle."

"Oh, God. When the first time bubble happened, this morning, the bus was going past the hospital. Hospitals have _maternity wards—"_

"Precisely." It was a low hiss.

"And then what? What do they do with them?" We'd reached the end of the row of cars. We'd have to cross the street to get to the gate. And then what? Jump through it? The Nodians would definitely see us. If they saw things at all. Were the Nodians those clouds of sparkles, or were those just tools of some sort?

"Put them in a dream engine."

"What does that do?" I asked. They weren't moving fast, whatever they were. The girl I had first spotted had barely moved a car length, and there were plenty more behind her.

First babies, then younger kids from the mall, then teenagers from a club. Whatever the Nodians were after, I wasn't sure they were getting it, or they wouldn't keep changing their pattern. "It locks them in a dreaming state, of course," the Doctor said. "The Nodians feed off of that." I shivered. "Oh, they don't hurt them. Nothing but pleasant dreams for Nodians. They might break families, leave untold tragedy in their wake, and keep their victims isolated for years, but they don't make them _suffer."_ He made the last word deeply scathing. "But that's not the most important thing about Nodians. The most important thing about Nodians—" The Doctor trailed off, then put his hand on my shoulder and shook me slightly. "Maria?"

"I—sorry, what?" I couldn't believe it. Deadly danger all around, and I just—what? Dazed out. Got lost in thought. Except I didn't even remember what I had been thinking about.

Not the best way to show that I was a capable adventuring companion. The Doctor must be wondering what Sarah Jane had been thinking.

Except he didn't seem to be. He plucked the temporal anchor out of the air, folded it back into its usual diamond shape, and tucked it into my pocket. "Dream engines," he said, "are easy enough to take care of if you can get to them. You have to disable the core. Take this," he pressed a sort of silvery tool into my hand, "and point it into the machine, right at the part that looks like a white-hot globe hanging on a long, glowing filament. Press this button—yes, that one, and _only_ that one. If you accidentally change the settings, heaven knows what will happen."

"Wait, why me? I don't even know what this—" Well, it looked a little bit like Sarah Jane's sonic lipstick, but I didn't really understand how _that_ worked either. "Why—"

"Aren't I doing it?"

I nodded.

"Because," the Doctor explained, with an air of exaggerated patience, "the Nodians will pop you into a dream engine as soon as look at you. One of us has to be the distraction and you're not it. Now, I don't have time to argue. They're almost done here."

They were. There were only three kids left to go through the door-in-the-air. I hadn't thought they were moving that fast.

"Stay close behind me until we get through the portal," the Doctor went on. "Keep away from the Nodians. Be quiet, be quick, and get all the children free; I'll take care of everything else. And, Maria?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

I wasn't even sure what he was thanking me for—everything was going too fast, all of a sudden. I followed him, dodging from car to car. "What's the most important thing about Nodians?" I hissed.

"What?"

"You were going to tell me the most important thing about Nodians. Just a moment ago."

"Was I?"

"Yes!"

"The most important thing about Nodians . . . hmm." He shook his head. "Ah, well. I'm sure it'll come back eventually."

Not reassuring. Not reassuring in the least. As far as I could tell, he didn't have anything like a real _plan,_ and we didn't have any time to come up with one.

But Sarah Jane trusted him, and he was running towards the monsters. I really wished I had more to go on, but that would have to be enough.

I followed him around one of those suburban Humvees, and that was where the Nodians caught us both.

~~~~~~~~

The sparkly clouds were the actual Nodians, I think. Up close, they were quite beautiful. Each drift of sparks was a slightly different shade, although never all that far from white—lilac-tinged white, blue-tinged white, and so forth. When I was very close to them, they made a sort of singing sound, like wind chimes that weren't quite chiming, just vibrating a little.

I was frozen stiff. Floating on my back.

I also wasn't as afraid as I thought I should be. Numb, really. I wasn't going to be _killed,_ but my dad wasn't going to get me back any time soon. God, it would be horrible for him. Dad is petrified of losing me. It would be like—like—I didn't even know.

I felt like crying, but my breathing went on without me, smooth and easy.

"Don't be sad." It was a whispery, silvery voice from the nearest cloud, which was slightly gold-tinted. "You're going to be very happy with us. So many lovely, lovely games to play." It had a sort of sing-song intonation to it. "Games to play, play all day. What do you wish for? Pretty flowers? Pretty clothes? Pretty creatures to ride across the meadows?"

We slid slowly through the portal.

I couldn't see all that much, because I was stuck and couldn't look around. But the landscape on the other side looked like a cross between a mineral water commercial and a Disney cartoon. The trees were impossibly green, there were rainbows in the mist, brilliant butterflies floated among flowers that were just a little bit too big, with dewdrops on their petals that were just a little too diamondlike. There was a waterfall on one side of me, although it wasn't making any noise.

"You use dreams in all your decorating," the Doctor said, somewhere off to my right. "I love what you've done with the space. How large is this pocket? A thousand feet, perhaps? But it looks like an entire enchanted forest." He sounded almost delighted. "Mind you, the great red mushrooms with the doors and windows are a trifle over the top—"

"You wish to communicate with the Nodians," one of the Nodians whisper-chimed.

"Yes, I do. You can tell because I'm communicating with you, and you're a—"

"Your mind is closed to us."

"Well." And now he sounded amused. I was about to get stuffed into a dreaming machine, maybe forever, and he was amused? I might not be able to get scared—and the Nodians had to be doing that to me, somehow—but I could get worried, and I was. I was helpless. If he didn't do something impressive, and soon— "You don't live to be seven hundred and fifty without picking up a trick here and there and would you like a jelly baby?"

"The Nodians love babies," the silvery voice said. "The Nodians love all children. More than fathers, more than mothers, more than big sisters or big brothers, the Nodians love, love, love—"

"Yes, I can tell by the way you take away all their freedom."

I tilted upright. I could see the Doctor now, surrounded by at least five Nodians, none of them close to him. They twitched away when he moved, as if they were frightened of him. I couldn't tell what they might be frightened of. He was weaponless—well, you don't need weapons to defeat aliens, although I've noticed that cellphones are often pretty good—and beaming pleasantly at them, as if they were his new best friends.

I settled on something soft. A cushion, only upright. I felt something wrap around my forehead and knew that this had to be a dream engine. I _still_ couldn't manage any real terror, and there was something horrific about that.

"You do realize you have a choice," the Doctor went on. "You don't have to steal people to make use of their dreams. You don't even have to control them. You could be symbiotes with the corporeal life forms around you, rather than parasites. Oh, you wouldn't have the raw power for space-shaping and time-bending, but imagine it." His voice dropped dramatically. _"Talking_ with other people, rather than merely using them. Giving as well as taking. Trading. You must have seen so many things in dreams, forests and skies and moonlight and seas, but you experience the real world only on your little hunting trips. And then, you're still stuck in your artificial pockets of time—you never have a chance to see planets as they were meant to be seen. Don't you want to? Don't you _long_ to? Aren't you curious?"

There was something—something that felt solid, but it was flowing up around my legs before hardening into place. I was going to be sealed in, caught like a bug in amber. "This is the Nodians' world," the cloud in front of the Doctor said. "The real world is ash and sorrow. The Nodians' world is pretty, pretty, bright growing flowers and bright shiny suns. Sometimes the plants are blue and sometimes they are purple and sometimes they are green—"

"Yes, because they reflect the expectations of the dreamers you take. But none of it is real."

"Nobody is sad and nobody is angry and nobody is hungry or cold. Why would anyone want to leave the Nodians' world?"

"Because it's tiny and limited and false?" For a moment, he sounded stern, but then he lowered his voice again. His tone was almost pleading. "Do you understand what happens to these children when you use them up, when you drop them back into the real world like so many discarded tissues? For the first time in years, they have to face a world where solid surfaces are solid, where things fall down and fire burns and actions have consequences that can never be wished away. How do you think they adjust? Do you really think the majority of your victims ever learn to live on their own—or survive at all? You have to realize— _some_ of you have to realize—that what you're doing is wrong."

I was almost sealed in now. My eyes were drifting closed. "The Nodians never hurt anyone," a Nodian said. It wasn't the same one, but I didn't think it made much difference. They sounded the same, right down to the faintly childish way they spoke. "The Nodians are kind. The Nodians are pretty, pretty. The Nodians find good children and make their wishes come true. The Nodians—"

_"The Nodians are parasites and cowards!"_

In a second, in a heartbeat, he'd gone from measured persuasion to spitting, _hissing_ rage. It was scary because it was so startling—because part of me said that happy-go-lucky grinning people shouldn't _do_ fury, let alone do fury like that. But that wasn't what made my stomach clench and my heart try to gallop out of my chest, as if all the fear I'd been missing caught up with me at once. I remembered. I _remembered._ I knew what the plan was.


	5. Chapter 5

"The most important thing about Nodians," the Doctor said, out behind the car, "or rather, the _second_ most important thing about Nodians is that they have incredible psychic perception. I could tell you their weakness, I could tell you how to beat them, and they'd pluck it right out of your brain before you ever began. Unless . . ."

"Unless?" I said.

"Unless you allow me to block the memory. To remove it from your conscious mind until the crucial moment."

Oh.

I didn't like that idea at all. It was spooky. And the Doctor—well, I didn't really even _know_ him, not like I knew Sarah Jane. He wasn't what I had expected. He was hyperactive and peculiar and he gave off the impression that at any given moment, he might decide to cluck like a chicken or grab me and dance a polka or _anything,_ just so long as it was completely mad. I wasn't sure I wanted him tampering with my brain.

Sarah Jane trusted him, though.

Sarah Jane didn't just trust him. She'd given him permission to do the very same thing, just this evening. That's what the coded conversation was about. That's why she hadn't remembered me when we met, why none of this would cause a paradox.

I think it was the way he'd said _thank you_ that really decided me. Not as if it were nothing. Not as if he automatically had the right, even though, looking back on it, it was probably the simplest and surest way to preserve the time-stream. "Okay." I took a deep breath. "Do what you have to do."

He shook his head. "You might still want to change your mind. You see, the Nodians are extraordinarily vulnerable to fear. _That's_ the most important thing about them. They live on dreams, but are poisoned by terror. If you've ever read _Voyage of the Dawn Treader,_ you'll perceive the fly in the ointment."

Oh God, yes. It wasn't the scariest book I ever read when I was little, but the chapter with the Dark Island was somewhere in the top ten. "So if there was a way to make the kids in the dream engines have nightmares—oh." Oh, no. "If _I_ got into a dream engine—"

"Or the Nodians put you there," the Doctor agreed softly. "Which they would happily do. They prefer children." That last sentence came out with a growled undertone. "The dream engine will make your dreams easier to direct. It works that way so that the Nodians can control their food supply, but it will respond to you, too. You can induce nightmares as you go under, simply by thinking about something that frightens you. And you can tear down everything they've built with just one bad dream."

I took a deep breath. "I don't think I can do it."

I saw disappointment on his face, even frustration, but all he said was, "No, I suppose not."

"I mean, not that I wouldn't try, but I can't just _be not scared_ when a bunch of parasitic aliens are strapping me into a machine. I can act not scared, but that wouldn't work. Not if they're psychic."

"That won't be a problem."

"Oh," I said in a small voice. Really more than a bit spooky. "Then—yes. I guess. I'll do it. Um—what do I have to do?"

The Doctor brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes and gave me a smile, not his usual toothy grin, but something a little bit more gentle. "Oh, nothing much. Just look at me. Look into my eyes . . ."

~~~~~~~~

I didn't know whether I had remembered automatically or whether the Doctor had used some sort of post-hypnotic trigger phrase, but it really didn't matter. I was trapped in a dream engine. I was already scared, but I needed to be flat-out terrified. I needed to do what he had told me, to think about a specific thing that frightened me and use that to bring on the nightmares. And from the dizzy, unreal feeling, I didn't have much time; I would be asleep in under a minute, no matter how scared I was. 

So I thought about rats.

I hate rats. I hated rats even before tonight, before I found out that time itself had rats in the walls and they were horrible headless things that could swallow me whole. I hate the sounds they make. When I was four, I couldn't watch the scene in _Lady and the Tramp_ where the rat gets into the baby's room. When I was even younger than that, I had a crying fit during the _Nutcracker,_ when the eight-headed villainous rat-king comes out. I've never lived anywhere with rats, I've never been bitten, the fear doesn't seem to be _from_ anywhere—except, possibly, from telly and movies. It's just a fact. I really, _really._ Can't. Stand. Rats.

And right now, I needed to be frightened. As frightened as I'd ever been. So I thought of the scariest book I'd known when I was little.

There were plenty of things in that book to be afraid of. I hadn't even gotten all the way through it, not when I was small. My Dad was reading it to me, and then he decided it was too intense and put it away until I was older—and I still don't know if it was because it scared me or because it made _him_ nervous. I was eight or nine before I got to the bit with the eyes, or the bargain she makes to try to save the souls of the other children, or the _hand—_ you know, the intense bits. Maybe that's why they didn't affect me as much.

But there's a part near the beginning where the heroine falls asleep and dreams that the rats come out of the wall and chant at her, and because it was rats, it always made my blood run ice-cold. _We are small but we are many. We are many, we are small. We were here before you rose; we will be here when you fall._

I repeated it in my mind as the liquid glass of the dream engine closed over my face, and I tried to remember ever terrifying rat moment I'd ever had. _Twilight Princess,_ one of the few video games that I actually own—there are bits where you start moving slowly for no reason, but then you switch to the mode that lets you see invisible things in the game and there are _skeletal rats all over you_. And today, after being grabbed from behind and watching the scavengers—no, the rats—swarm over a thrown marble like it was raw steak, the shudder that went down my spine when the Doctor said _rats in the walls of the world._

Rats could be anywhere. Anywhere you heard an unexplained rustling, it could be them. _We have teeth and we have tails. We have tails, we have eyes._ And the time-rats, with their horrid round mouths and their throats that seemed to go back to infinity, scavenging between seconds and living at the bottom of the universe. They could really be anywhere; they could be swarming over my Dad right now, and since they were outside of time, he'd never be able to escape. _We were here before you fell; we will be here when you rise._

I didn't remember when I had opened my eyes, but I was definitely looking around at the Nodians' enchanted forest. It was twilight, a weird sort of half-day with afternoon gold around the edges. I was standing on my own, not in the dream engine, and for one long moment, everything was quiet and serene.

And then they came, from all directions. Brown and grey and black, glowing yellow eyes and chittering teeth, some of them cartoons and some of them skeletons and some of them headless things from the bottom of the universe, all in a tide of hunched backs and skittering claws. I turned and ran for the nearest tree.

Something pulled it down into the ground before I could reach it, and I realized they weren't just rampaging through the forest. They had tunneled beneath it.

When I realized _that,_ the ground started opening up, in great dark gashes full of glittering eyes.

I shut my eyes for an instant. "This is a dreamworld," I said. "If this is a dreamworld, there will be a rock. A big rock. Too big to be tugged under, too solid to be moved—"

I opened my eyes and I was right. I sprinted for it.

It was further away than I had thought. Or else I was running without moving. Smoky greyness boiled out of the gashes in the land, coalescing into rats with no heads and rats with five heads and rats with eight. They sounded like they were laughing at me. "Stop this," a voice said, close beside me. Silvery, like wind-chimes.

I didn't bother to look. I was too busy running. Trying to run. Struggling to run.

"You don't want this. You don't like this. We could give you everything you wish. A mummy and a daddy who love each other and all your friends together. You could fly like a butterfly. You could float like a cloud." They were coming from all directions, now, flooding between me and my rock of safety. "You could play, play all day. Luke and Clyde and Yoko and no school, no rules, nothing but happiness. We can give you anything at all, just _stop_ this—"

"It wouldn't be real," I gasped. There was nowhere to run. In a moment, they'd be on me—they'd start _touching_ me. I didn't think I could stand it if they started touching me, but I couldn't give in. "Isn't real. None of it is real. Somewhere outside, Dad would be crying, so I'll tear it down—tear it all down—no matter what. _We have eyes and we have nerveses. We have tails, we have teeth. You will get what you deserveses, when we rise from underneath—"_

"Fine." And the wind-chime voice took on a new, discordant tone. "This isn't real. Not really, really real. But it's all you'll ever get. He pulled your strings and made you dance, tricked you in and made you dream, but don't ever, ever think he's coming _back_ for you. He's leaving you. In a pocket in time, in a pocket in space, in a broken dream machine in an eaten forest, that's where you'll spend forever and ever and ever, trapped between one second and the next, _with the rats."_

They washed over me like a wave, and I screamed.


	6. Chapter 6

And then I was lying on something hard, and there was a baby crying, and I was awake.

More than one baby crying, and someone swearing incredulously. "I don't _know_ where they came from," a boy's voice was saying somewhere nearby, "the last thing I remember, I was right next to the Dippin' Dots—"

Someone put an arm beneath my shoulders. I opened my eyes.

Just right then, that lunatic face and wild hair was the most welcome sight in the universe. "Welcome back," the Doctor said.

I sat up.

There was a small but growing traffic jam on the street, because the pavement was full of children and teenagers. None of them seemed to be hurt, but all of them looked confused. Several of the teenagers were holding babies. Some of them looked like they thought the babies might explode. There was a growing crowd of pedestrians and I saw at least three people talking on cellphones, probably to the police. "We did it," I breathed.

"No more Nodians," the Doctor agreed. "At least, no more from that collective. Alarums and confusion abound, but every single missing child is here. Spilled back into reality like so many pennies out of a pocket." He helped me to my feet. "I think, perhaps, that we should exit discreetly."

"I think you're right."

I followed him. Everyone was in too much of a lather to bother us, or else they took one look at him and decided he could be Somebody Else's Problem. All the same, I didn't feel quite comfortable until the hubbub faded behind us. The Doctor changed direction quite suddenly, made for a bench, and motioned for me to sit down beside him. "You're quite certain you're all right," he said.

"I think so." He looked at me intently. "A little shaken up," I admitted. "At the end, I think one of the Nodians started _trying_ to scare me. It said you were going to leave me—that you weren't coming back—"

"I never went anywhere," the Doctor pointed out. "You were unconscious. But, yes. Nodians refrain from hurting their victims out of biological necessity, not good manners. They're heartless sociopaths underneath the shine. When they realized they had nothing left to lose, why not indulge in a little petty vengeance? And what better vengeance than to make you think that your trust was misplaced, your leap of faith gone horribly wrong? To make you think I would discard you, as if you were no more than a weapons delivery system? Nasty creatures."

"That's basically what I was, though." I'd said _we did it,_ but really, it was all the Doctor.

"Don't be absurd!" Instant indignation.

"But—"

"I came up with the plan, yes, but that's just because I'm a genius. And the whole thing wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't picked up a few tricks from a fellow named Mesmer, but really, Maria! Do you think—do you honestly believe—that any of it would have worked if you hadn't _willingly_ embraced your fears? You could have wrenched your dream back to sweet nothings in an instant, if you chose; that's what those Nodians were trying to tell you. Twenty-seven families are not in mourning tonight, because you, Maria Jackson, had the courage to be extremely frightened."

I couldn't think of anything to say. I felt a bit stunned, and—I don't know, humbled. The Doctor approved of me. In the world-saving business, that's—pretty big. Huge.

"Are you _sure_ you don't want a jelly baby?" the Doctor added cheerily.

I laughed a little and took one.

~~~~~~~~

"You," Sarah Jane said a few minutes later, in an accusatory tone, "left me!"

"You were operating purely in aleph time. I couldn't bring you along."

Dad had his arm around me and was watching the two time travellers with more than a bit of wariness. He might trust the older Sarah Jane—very reluctantly, at first—but he wasn't _at all_ happy with me being hauled into peril by a very strange stranger. When he'd caught up with us, after a frantic cellphone conversation, he'd said a few things to the Doctor. Things like, _I am grateful to you for helping to save everyone, but if you ever,_ ever _take my daughter anywhere without asking my permission—_

The Doctor made his eyes very wide, nodded solemnly, and offered him—well, the obvious. I got the distinct feeling the Doctor was amused, like a wolfhound being chased off by a chihuahuah.

On the other hand, underneath the wide grins and over-dramatic attitude and boggle-eyed stares, he was seriously hard to read sometimes. I hadn't realized that he was deliberately maneuvering us into being captured, and I hadn't realized how furious he was with the Nodians. I thought for a moment that he rather liked my dad for standing up to him, but that could have just been my imagination.

He certainly didn't get angry with people for arguing with him. Sarah Jane put her hands on her hips. "You could have, and you know it! You could have given that anchor whatsit to me. Instead, you took _her."_ For a surreal instant, I thought Sarah Jane was jealous of me. Then she went on, "I don't care how capable Maria is, Doctor, she's a child. She could have gotten hurt."

"I can look after myself," I said indignantly. "Which is more than L—um. Okay. That _is_ weird. Can you have deja vu when you're talking with someone before they have the conversations that you're—" God, how do people _do_ time travel? Maybe the Doctor's brain is wired for it or something, but how did Sarah Jane ever keep it straight?

"Three reasons," the Doctor said. "First, the anchor was her property."

"Like that ever stops you—"

"I haven't the slightest idea what you could possibly be talking about. Second, Verron soothsayers typically play a long and subtle game, which could mean that, although the anchor protected her before, it could have been given to her with an eye towards this specific moment as well—which meant that something about her specifically could be critical to our success. And as I so often am, I was right. We couldn't have destroyed the Nodians half so easily if Maria had been an adult."

"And the third reason?" Sarah Jane asked.

"Maria has the trust of someone whom _I_ trust. Implicitly."

Sarah Jane looked at him for a moment. "You think she travelled—will travel—with us," she said. "In our future. That she knows you're a Time Lord because you—maybe a future you—told her . . ."

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Leet alien hypnosis or not, I didn't need to tell Sarah Jane too much. I didn't know the details, but I knew she hadn't left the Doctor happily, or even willingly, and it had taken her some time to adjust to it.

I thought I saw a faint flicker of expression on the Doctor's face—he _didn't_ think I travelled with them, he knew for a fact that Sarah Jane would have to leave someday—but all he said was, "I think you're going to find out." He grinned. "But right now, I also think we should be going. Maria, Alan—" He tipped his hat slightly.

"Well." Sarah Jane stepped forward to shake my hand. "It's going to be very good to meet you, Maria."

~~~~~~~~

International phone calls are expensive. Sarah Jane _could_ use Mister Smith to get rid of all the charges, but she won't do that unless it's an emergency. So I usually talk with her and Luke on Chattrbox, on the internet.

The next evening, when I opened my laptop and my soda, she was already waiting for me. _"Maria,"_ she wrote, _"I have a very important question. Have you had any adventures recently?"_

I grinned. "You remembered," I typed back.

_"I got an unsigned letter this morning that just said 'Nodians.' When I saw that, it all came back."_

I heard Dad come in downstairs. I said, "I'm up here," over my shoulder and turned back to the keyboard. _"Well, he did say he was putting the memories in storage, not getting rid of them."_ I paused for a moment. _"He wasn't what I expected."_

 _"That one of him wasn't what *anyone* expected,"_ Sarah Jane said. I remembered her saying that the Doctor changed shape every once in a while—that he somehow sort of reincarnated himself when he was fatally injured. _"You could drop him into a conversation and see it careen into total chaos within moments. Especially with the bad guys. It was always hilarious to watch, or would have been if we hadn't been in immediate danger of death. What didn't you expect? The mood swings? That unbelievable scarf?"_

I thought about it for a moment. _"Those, too. Mostly, that he was sneaky,"_ I typed. And hit Return, and then added hastily, _"I don't mean that as a bad thing."_ Return, so she'd see it faster. _"But—"_ And I tried to type a brief rundown of how we had taken down the Nodians and turned their pocket universe inside out, all in one stroke.

 _"He probably tried to downplay it as just a knack for hypnosis,"_ Sarah Jane remarked halfway through.

 _"It's psychic powers, though."_ I didn't put a question mark on it because it wasn't a question. I'd actually assumed it was a special Time Lord thing from the start; the Doctor hadn't offered a lot of explanation, just told me what he could do.

_"Yes."_

_"And you were really uncomfortable with it."_

_"Sometimes. I got better about it. But you have to understand, for whatever reason, I have extremely low psychic resistance. Just about any being with a bit of mental strength can muscle into my brain and start rearranging the furniture. The Doctor had to save me from that a few times."_

I blinked. I wasn't used to thinking of Sarah Jane as having vulnerabilities like that. Chattrbox said, _satiable_curtiosity is typing,_ so I held still for a moment.

 _"When your best friend could easily do the same thing to you,"_ Sarah Jane concluded, _"even though you * know* he's a perfect gentleman about it and that's one of the few things he'll never make a joke out of—well, it can feel very awkward. So, you're right. I was uncomfortable."_

I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I typed, _"He reminds me of you. Which is weird, because mostly he's completely different."_

_"Reminds you of me? How?"_

_"He tried to talk to the monsters."_ I took a swallow of my soda and went on typing. _"I mean, he was *furious* with them. But he tried to get them to give up and cooperate and not hurt anyone. That's like you. And it turns out those time rats could have killed him, but he wasn't even worried about that; he was worried about them getting me. That's like you."_

Dad came into the room carrying a small box and wearing a very peculiar expression. "Maria?"

 _"Sorry,"_ I added, _"Dad needs to talk, I will be afk for a minute."_ I pushed my chair back and said, "What's up?"

"Someone gave me a package for you." The peculiar look wasn't gone. If anything, it was intensifying.

"Just—someone?" I couldn't think of anyone who owed me a package of anything.

"A man. Young man, somewhat strange, a bit weedy-looking. He was spinning around in my chair when I got into the office this morning, and he seems to have done something bizarre to my desktop sculpture and permanently put my phone on Moscow time while he was there. He gave me this, name-dropped Alan Turing in a way that made it sound almost like he'd met him, and left. I opened it when I got home, and—" He opened the box and took out a note. "Look."

In red pen, the note said _For Maria Jackson,_

_If you ever need local help: A Charitable Earth Foundation._

I frowned at it. "And that's all?" No signature, no address.

"No. There was also this."

It was a familiar white paper bag, full to the brim with jelly babies.


End file.
